“... then necessarily the continuing internal conflict, can be seen as interconnected. Such a theory may now be in sight. Its basis is the progressive unification of economics and ecology. It is not industrial production as such which has led to these major contradictions. That is the weakest side of the ecology movement, which has correctly identified current ...”

“... theatrical London, literary London, commercial London and, finally, maritime London.’ One may be puzzled at this description and one might have wished that the good Doctor had been more precise in his definitions and delineations. Is it possible to note so exactly these different areas of London? No such doubts exist for Mr Lottman. There is an area ...”

“... a Lark cigarette from this Tiffany box. Here. I’ll light it for you with my Dunhill.’ ‘May I have this dance, Lady Darlene? I am the Earl of Grant ford.’ ‘Indeed you may, Earl, honey. I am Lady Darlene.’ There are even touches of Gracie (or is it Woody?) Allen:   ‘Was your father weak, passive, absent ...”

“... other major French writer of that century or this; even Zola, stodgy, paunchy bourgeois though he may have been, at least pitchforked himself into the Dreyfus Affair. But Stendhal never really brought off anything – except, of course, the novels. We watch him drifting and coasting along, dependent on high-placed, energetic patrons like the aforementioned ...”

“... Liverpool has always been a special case in British politics. At first glance the pattern may appear much the same as anywhere else: Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative, with Labour intruding towards the end. The names may be the same: their significance was widely different ...”

“... say he were a simple man, but none of us can say that any more.’ There are, as these passages may have made apparent, two voices muttering in the shadows behind Kennaway’s prose, and they are the Old Firm of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. You can hear Hemingway grumbling in the rhythm of the faux-naif opening; it could be Colonel Cantwell muttering to ...”

“... and the book is so short, that the English reader is likely to be confused at a first reading, and may in the end – for all the notes provided – have still only a summary sense of them. All in all, The Meeting at Telgte is oddly summary, coming from a writer famous for his exuberance. Exuberance is present in the book, but as an idea rather than as actual ...”

“... of verse goes to the making of such a poem as ‘What is terrible’, so that his earlier work may be said to be bearing fruit, but what gives the poem life is that he has broken through the derivative verbiage which was apt to swill too freely round the more superficial layers of his mind and grasps helplessly for a bit of reality: Life at last I know is ...”

“... Manning wished his biographer to be J.E.C. Bodley, Sir Charles Dilke’s private secretary, but he may well not have said so to Purcell. Yet, with every allowance made, Purcell does seem to have behaved in a manner that was none too scrupulous. He persuaded the curators of Manning’s papers at the Church of St Mary of the Angels in Bayswater that he was the ...”

“... he hopes that ‘the time, travel and intellectual stimulation that my present position gives me may expand the space for critical thought more than the privileges I enjoy erode it.’ John Hall, now at the University of Southampton, read history at Oxford but was seduced (his word) by Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy into ...”

“... than Leonard Bast, low-class, anxious for promotion, fearful that he might drop into the Abyss. It may have come as a relief from all these ironies when Forster connected with PC Daley in the Twenties – for Daley was a working-class man, quite as cultivated and artistic as Leonard Bast, but not at all anxious for promotion, quite happy with the Abyss, where ...”

“... generations of students to the engaged prose of the great periodicals of the 19th century, and may help to enable the concern with German letters to re-enter the mainstream of English literary history where it so richly belongs. Those who have read Mrs Ashton’s thesis (from which this book derives) may regret that much ...”

“... chapter. However, later remarks in unconnected conversations have given me to think that there may have been a deeper motive: as an avowed homosexualist with an extensive and curious knowledge of medical/military affairs in Cairo in the First World War, Monck (and not alone in that generation) had some kind of needle about the virtual sanctification of ...”

“... compare this with ‘A Satyr on Charles II’: His sceptre and his prick are of a length And she may sway the one who plays with th’other. Riotous behaviour like smashing up the King’s sundial may perhaps be regarded as undergraduate fun. But such frolics could lead on occasion to murder, whether in a duel or in ...”

“... cage whence the winged heart escapes into Copernican infinity.’ The general principle which we may adduce from her essays on Bruno, culminating in her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), is that what is important in charting the history of thought is not only (or even primarily) the superficial characteristics of the ideas adopted – whether ...”